Day: June 2, 2005

The Louisiana trip holding pattern, and other things…

D'Arque Bishop2 Comments

*sigh*

Well, it turns out that my trip to Louisiana’s been postponed again. As much as I’m not looking forward to going to Houma and Jennings, I’d just as soon get it over and done with. This time I’m stuck waiting on a new hard drive to install on the Houma server. Once that’s ordered and in, I can go ahead and do the upgrade and be done with it. As it stands I’m stuck waiting for an IDE CD burner to come in so I can replace the CD burner on the server in Cypress. Looks like THAT task will have to be done tomorrow…

Sean surprised me last night at around 8:30 PM by calling me and asking if I wanted to do dinner and coffee with him and his wife. I had no problem with that, so off I went to meet them at Strack’s (a local barbecue restaurant) at 9 PM. He and Ginny got there, we sat down, and caught up over dinner. (I hadn’t planned on eating there, but I was beginning to feel a bit peckish, so I had a barbecue beef sandwich.) After dinner, we went over to Denny’s for coffee. (Yes, yes, we could have eaten at Denny’s. Strack’s has better food.) It was really good catching up with them and getting an idea of where the old crowd has gotten to. Some of the info made me raise an eyebrow (Sean’s ex married his younger brother?! She’s OUR age!), but overall, things are good. :-) Here’s to keeping in contact more after the long disconnect.

I still need to make a couple of changes to the main site… hmm. I might put in a link to my Gallery, plus maybe an About Me page. The site’s still a work in progress, so even though it’s open, there’s always room for improvement. I also kinda wish a small summary of each post posted to the LJ instead of the entire thing, but I can live with that for now.

Anyway, I gotta make a phone call for a support issue. Fun fun…

MS Office 12 to use open standards by default?

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=163702981

When Office 12 debuts next year, the default “save-to” file format of the applications will be XML. Or at least a version which Microsoft is calling Microsoft Open XML Formats.
A company exec was quick to note, however, that the new applications will also support the traditional binary .doc, .xl, and .ppt formats, but unless users designate otherwise, their work will save to the XML choice. The default format can be changed during or after deployment, Microsoft said. With this version of Office, PowerPoint is brought into the XML fold, along with Word and Excel.

Backward compatibility with current file formats is also important. If a Word 2000 user ships a document to someone on the latest Word, changes made by the recipient will automatically save back to the original application’s native file format. Thus the new Word will open even a Word 97 file and save information back to that format so it can be read by the originator.

…

He also reiterated Microsoft’s past pledges to publish its XML format specifications and schemas in advance of the product launch and them as royalty-free downloads.

The current Office 2003 allows users to save Word and Excel documents to its own WordML and SpreadsheetML (XML) formats. The new version adds PowerPoint to the mix. Numoto said those formats, as well as the upcoming iterations, are completely compliant with the XML 1.0 standard.

Granted, the cynic in me wonders how much MS will keep in line with what they’re saying. However, if this goes anywhere like I think it would, this could be a very good thing, especially as far as other programs like OpenOffice.org and WordPerfect having full MS Office compatibility. I’ve always believed MS should open the formats and compete on features, just like Adobe does with Acrobat and its PDF format. Like it or not, even though I use OpenOffice.org at home, I would be foolish to say the best office suite right now is anything other than MS Office.

In any event, it should be interesting to see where things go from here.